New from Cambridge University Press!

Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

This book contains ten of the sixteen papers presented at a workshop on prosodic morphology in 1994 at Utrecht University. The theory of prosodic morphology was originally developed in papers by McCarthy and Prince, particularly McCarthy and Prince (1990). As it happened, the authors soon rendered their own theory obsolescent by their new approach to phonology, Optimality Theory (henceforth OT). This book looks at the impact of OT on the theory of prosodic morphology.

The work begins with a brief introduction by Rene Kager and Wim Zonneveld to the history of phonology (starting with SPE, Chomsky and Halle 1968), the (short) history of prosodic morphology, an introduction to OT, and finally a synopsis of the other papers.

I suspect that most readers not already familiar with the theories will find Kager and Zonneveld's necessarily brief overview of phonology and morphology confusing. For example, it will be unclear why an SPE-type analysis requires the use of a diacritic feature for vowel harmony in Igbo (page 3). (Answer: it doesn't, although this is indeed how Chomsky and Halle analyzed it. But this particular use of diacritic features was abandoned shortly thereafter.) Another confusion is introduced by the statement that in Arabic, "consonants play the role of stems (or binyanim)" (page 5). In fact, a binyan is not a set of consonants, but more like a slot in a paradigm, combining a particular meaning with a particular templatic form.

The remaining chapters consist of the papers themselves, which I will summarize and comment on in the following paragraphs. I have written "ROA" after the title where the paper is available for download from the Rutgers Optimality Archive (http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/ROA/), although the version there might be different.

- -------------------------------------

Stuart Davis "On the moraic representation of underlying geminates: evidence from prosodic morphology": Under one version of moraic phonology, geminates are represented as moraic consonants. In a language without a rule of "weight-by-position" (which would also assign a mora to a consonant in a syllable coda), syllables closed by a geminate consonant should then pattern with syllables containing a long vowel (because both of these syllable types would have two moras), and unlike open syllables or syllables closed by a non-geminate consonant. The existence of such languages has been doubted. Davis uses evidence from phonology and prosodic morphology to argue that such languages do exist. However, the morphological evidence seems questionable, given the non-derivational assumptions of OT. Davis' analysis of CVC syllables in Hausa as monomoraic, for example, depends on a derivational analysis with ordered rules, incompatible with a pure OT analysis. (See Davis' footnote six.)

There is a typo in example (4e) (page 40): the stressed vowel should be long (a short vowel here would be unstressed).

Laura Downing "Verbal reduplication in three Bantu languages": Downing contrasts prefixing (and even infixing) reduplication in three Bantu languages. As usual in the OT literature, the differences are attributed largely to the relative ranking of the constraints governing the form of the reduplicant. But unlike earlier analyses, the author argues that (for two of the languages) the template for reduplication must be defined in terms of the "canonical verb stem", a definition which is not purely prosodic (prosodic constituents include the mora, syllable, foot, and prosodic word). I might also add that while proponents of OT have often claimed that the constraints which the theory manipulates are universal, actual analyses often contain constraints that are clearly non-universal. Downing's analysis is no exception, for example (her (37) page 83, for Kinande):

At least one stem vowel (excluding the final vowel) of the morphological stem must have a correspondent in the prosodic filter.

Larry Hyman and Al Mtenje "Prosodic morphology and tone: the case of Chichewa": This is not an article for the faint-hearted (or the reviewer on a deadline!), for the depth of detail, dialectal variation, and alternative analyses which the authors examine (or which the reader may imagine) make for a hard read. Hyman and Mtenje argue that a level-ordered (derivational) analysis fails to explain tone in reduplicated forms in Chichewa (Bantu), and that an OT analysis is superior. But we have not heard the last word, for the OT analysis has difficulties, too: they admit (in footnote 26) that in at least one case, a derivational analysis achieves observational adequacy where the OT analysis does not, and elsewhere (page 117 and footnote 29) allude to the need for "repair strategies" a la Paradis (1988), something which is outside the scope of 'true' OT.

Sharon Inkelas "Exceptional stress-attracting suffixes in Turkish: representations versus the grammar" (ROA): A common assumption is that metrification is not stored lexically. Morphemes which are exceptions to the usual stress patterns of the language must then be treated by morpheme-specific constraints (MSC) in the grammar (i.e. phonology). Inkelas argues that marking exceptional metrical structure in the lexicon is explanatorily superior to the MSC solution, which in turn has implications for the use of prosodic templates in reduplication (see McCarthy and Prince article below). I might add that the MSC solution is vague, in that it is not clear how a constraint specifies a morpheme: does it point to the lexical entry, or to an underlying form? The answer to this question has important implications for A-Morphous morphology (Anderson 1992), the Separation Hypothesis (Beard 1995), and suppletive allomorphy.

Junko Ito and Armin Mester "Realignment": In a paper devoted largely to phonology, Ito and Mester propose that syllabification should be seen as the result of constraints on alignment. As in much work in OT, this approach calls for a family of very general constraints, e.g. "Align a consonant with the left boundary of a syllable". Individual languages rank more specific forms of these constraints, e.g. "Align an obstruent...".

One of the claims of OT is that constraints are universal, and that languages differ only in the ranking of those universal constraints. But I fail to see a substantial difference in universality between a family of constraints represented universally by a general constraint (as in Ito and Mester's proposal), and a rule-schema such as "spread a single feature node" in the later versions of derivational autosegmental phonology.

Another issue Ito and Mester bring up in passing is the function of constraints: "We hypothesize that segment-alignment constraints are related to a more fundamental requirement: segments should be prominent" (page 199). But it is unclear how this functionalist approach can be reconciled with the idea that the constraints are innate.

John McCarthy and Alan Prince "Faithfulness and identity in prosodic morphology" (ROA): This is by far the longest paper in this collection, and best read first, since many of the other papers are reactions to it. McCarthy and Prince begin by revising their earlier theory of prosodic morphology, in which the content of e.g. reduplicative morphemes was characterized in prosodic terms (as a syllable, foot, minimal word etc.), in favor of their characterization as affix, root, stem or word; the prosodic form then follows (indirectly) from constraints on the shape of those morphemes or words. (See Inkelas' article above for one reaction to this.)

The authors then turn to languages with reduplicative morphology in which a phonological process appears to apply to both base and the reduplicant, even though from a purely phonological viewpoint it would be expected to apply only to one or the other. Their analysis, based on a constraint calling for identity between Base and Reduplicant (B/R identity, parallel to the I/O faithfulness constraint holding between Input and Output forms), seems strong evidence in favor of OT and against a derivational account. (An earlier derivational analysis, Wilbur 1973, relied on an otherwise unattested notion of identity between a constituent and its copy. It might however be interesting to seek a connection between Wibur's approach and later work on geminate inalterability in derivational phonology.)

An interesting implication of the OT analysis in which B/R identity may be ranked below (less important than) I/O faithfulness, is that other phonological constraints may be ranked in between these. In particular, constraints on prosodic shape of affixes, roots etc. may be ranked lower than I/O faithfulness. With "ordinary" affixation, such constraints would not be evident, being masked by the I/O identity. But since reduplicants do not have any input, these constraints manifest themselves in reduplication. McCarthy and Prince refer to the unmasking of such constraints in reduplicated forms as "the emergence of the unmarked." (There is an un-addressed question here: if the ranking of these constraints is visible only in reduplicative constructions, is that ranking more difficult to learn?)

Joe Pater "Austronesian nasal substitution and other NC effects" (the "C" has the IPA symbol for voicelessness under it; for typological reasons, I use "C" here to mean "voiceless consonant") (ROA): In another paper largely about phonology, Pater argues that while languages get rid of sequences of Nasal+C sequences in a variety of ways (fusing the N+C into a nasal with point of articulation of the C, or voicing the C, or deleting the N, etc.), all these effects are the result of a single universal constraint against a nasal followed by a voiceless consonant, a constraint he characterizes as "hugging the phonetic ground." (A non-OT analysis might be that phonological processes doing away with N+C sequences arise diachronically for phonetic reasons, and that what can be explained functionally does not need to be explained by a universal constraint.)

In some languages, there is a complication: N+C fuse into N only at morpheme boundaries (a derived environment effect). Pater accounts for this by splitting one of the constraints into a root-internal constraint and a general constraint, with the former more highly ranked. (Is this a stipulation, or an explanation? Do all constraints come in two such versions?)

Sam Rosenthall "The prosodic base of the Hausa plural": This paper explores the formation of sound and broken plurals in several Hausa noun classes. (In Hausa "broken plurals", part of the stem appears inside the plural suffix, or vice versa.) The analysis refers explicitly to various iambic templates (H, HH, LH, where L = Light syllable, and H = Heavy), as in the version of prosodic morphology developed in McCarthy and Prince (1990). It might prove challenging to reformulate Rosenthall's insights in terms of the version of prosodic morphology in McCarthy and Prince's article in this book (see above). Unfortunately, this point is not expanded on.

Grazyna Rowicka "Prosodic optimality and prefixation in Polish": Rowicka gives a clever solution to the much-discussed problem of "yers": vowels (in Slavic languages) whose appearance is governed by the presence of a following (non-appearing) yer. The solution relies on the possibility that in a single language (and even a single word), there may be both syllable-based and mora-based feet, a controversial claim. The connection with prosodic morphology lies in the idea that in Polish, prefixes are not normally included in the prosodic word, but may be included to satisfy certain constraints.

Suzanne Urbanczyk: "Double reduplications in parallel" (ROA): Lushootseed (Salishan) has several reduplicative affixes; two such affixes can attach to a single word, and Broselow (1983) had used the properties of such "double reduplications" to support cyclic rule application. Urbanczyk argues that in the context of OT, the data provide no evidence for cyclicity. Her analysis relies on morpheme-specific constraints (one morpheme obeys a faithfulness constraint, while the other violates it in the relevant construction). An apparent alternative within OT would be two sets of constraint rankings, plus cyclic application of the constraints. One affix would belong to one of these co-phonologies, and the other affix to the other co-phonology, similar to the rule strata of Lexical Phonology. But Urbanczyk shows that this alternative does not account for the dependence of the shape of the inner affix on that of the outer affix. The downside of her analysis is the need for morpheme-specific constraints, but the putative universal status of constraints in other OT work seems doubtful in any case (see my earlier comments on Downing's and Ito and Mester's papers).

---------------------------------------

The editing has been done well, save that typesetting has slightly mangled some constraint names. There are separate indices for subjects, constraints, languages, and linguists' names.

I close with a general comment. Perhaps the greatest shortcoming of this book is the delay between the workshop in 1994 and publication of (a subset of) the papers in 1999, particularly unfortunate given the rapid changes in OT during those years. Possibly some of the papers have been revised in the interim. (An occasional footnote reflects input from the conference, and there are some references with publication dates up through 1999, albeit mostly by the authors themselves.) As noted earlier, many of the papers have been made available in the Rutgers Optimality Archive in the interim, and other authors (e.g. Downing) have published revised analyses elsewhere, which further reduces the interest of this printed book. The delay would have been more understandable if there had been more added value to the book, such as inclusion of the discussion from the floor.

Wilbur, Ronnie. 1973. "The phonology of reduplication." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois; published (1973) by the IULC.

Reviewer: Mike Maxwell has a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Washington. He has been a consultant for field linguists working in indigenous languages of Ecuador and Colombia, and now works in computational morphology and phonology.